Failing to Deliver: One Stop Employment Centers

In 1999, CCH started its Day Labor Organizing Project. The project grew from a survey of over five hundred interviews with homeless individuals, conducted in shelters during one evening. The results showed that many of those surveyed were employed, but three-fourths had day labor jobs. Eighty-two percent of these jobs had wages of $5.50 or less, which were too insufficient to enable them to rent their own apartment. CCH worked from 1999 until 2002 on the abuses common to the day labor industry: no pay for overtime, transportation fees, and race, gender, and age discrimination. Day laborers continued to face homelessness because, ultimately, even under the best working environment, temporary work at low wages leaves workers in poverty. While organizing in shelters with day laborers, CCH discovered that job seekers were seeking services at local Workforce Centers. Often referred to as One-Stop centers because of the concentrated services available in one place, the centers are supposed to be a resource to job seekers that provides career training and employment services to the unemployed and underemployed. Job seekers, particularly day laborers, sought services that would lead to permanent work at livable wages. As organizers from CCH continued to hear from One-Stop clients living in shelters, we found that many were being placed into temporary jobs with low-wages and their need for skills training was not being met. The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless developed a test project to evaluate the effectiveness of the services at the One-Stop centers from January to July of 2004. The project shadowed 16 One-Stop participants as they navigated the system of services over a period of six months, as well as spoke to over 35 job seekers during that same period. To broaden the scope of our research, in August and September of 2004 CCH organized 30 volunteers from the community to survey participants at the One-Stop centers throughout the city. This report is the result of 170 interviews conducted during that time period. Overall, the research revealed that respondents were not satisfied with the services they received through the One-Stop centers. Had respondents received the services they requested, they may have been able to achieve self-sufficiency through wage or skill increases. However, over half of respondents did not receive the services they requested. While many people reported that developing a career plan with a job developer was beneficial, only one-fifth of respondents had created one. Also, most respondents received job training (69 percent), but 45 percent of those individuals reported that job training was not geared toward job placement

A quantitative narrative on movement, disease and patch exploitation in nesting agent groups

Abstract Animal relocation data has recently become considerably more ubiquitous, finely structured (collection frequencies measured in minutes) and co-variate rich (physiology of individuals, environmental and landscape information, and accelerometer data). To better understand the impacts of ecological interactions, individual movement and disease on global change ecology, including wildlife management and conservation, it is important to have simulators that will provide demographic, movement, and epidemiology null models against which to compare patterns observed in empirical systems. Such models may then be used to develop quantitative narratives that enhance our intuition and understanding of the relationship between population structure and generative processes: in essence, along with empirical and experimental narratives, quantitative narratives are used to advance ecological epistemology. Here we describe a simulator that accounts for the influence of consumer-resource interactions, existence of social groups anchored around a central location, territoriality, group-switching behavior, and disease dynamics on population size. We use this simulator to develop new and reinforce existing quantitative narratives and point out areas for future study. Author summary The health and viability of species are of considerable concern to all nature lovers. Population models are central to our efforts to assess the numerical and ecological status of species and threats posed by climate change. Models, however, are crude caricatures of complex ecological systems. So how do we construct reliable assessment models able to capture processes essential to predicating the impacts of global change on population viability without getting tied up in their vast complexities? We broach this question and demonstrate how models focusing at the level of the individual (i.e., agent-based models) are tools for developing robust, narratives to augment narratives arising purely from empirical data sources and experimental outcomes. We do this in the context of nesting social groups, foraging for food, while exhibiting territoriality and group-switching behavior; and, we evaluate the impact of disease on the viability of such populations

Adequacy of SEIR models when epidemics have spatial structure: Ebola in Sierra Leone.

Dynamic SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Removed) compartmental models provide a tool for predicting the size and duration of both unfettered and managed outbreaks-the latter in the context of interventions such as case detection, patient isolation, vaccination and treatment. The reliability of this tool depends on the validity of key assumptions that include homogeneity of individuals and spatio-temporal homogeneity. Although the SEIR compartmental framework can easily be extended to include demographic (e.g. age) and additional disease (e.g. healthcare workers) classes, dependence of transmission rates on time, and metapopulation structure, fitting such extended models is hampered by both a proliferation of free parameters and insufficient or inappropriate data. This raises the question of how effective a tool the basic SEIR framework may actually be. We go some way here to answering this question in the context of the 2014-2015 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa by comparing fits of an SEIR time-dependent transmission model to both country- and district-level weekly incidence data. Our novel approach in estimating the effective-size-of-the-populations-at-risk ( Neff) and initial number of exposed individuals ( E0) at both district and country levels, as well as the transmission function parameters, including a time-to-halving-the-force-of-infection ( tf/2) parameter, provides new insights into this Ebola outbreak. It reveals that the estimate R0 ≈ 1.7 from country-level data appears to seriously underestimate R0 ≈ 3.3 - 4.3 obtained from more spatially homogeneous district-level data. Country-level data also overestimate tf/2 ≈ 22 weeks, compared with 8-10 weeks from district-level data. Additionally, estimates for the duration of individual infectiousness is around two weeks from spatially inhomogeneous country-level data compared with 2.4-4.5 weeks from spatially more homogeneous district-level data, which estimates are rather high compared with most values reported in the literature. This article is part of the theme issue 'Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: approaches and important themes'. This issue is linked with the subsequent theme issue 'Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: epidemic forecasting and control'

Simulation and Analysis of Animal Movement Paths using Numerus Model Builder

ABSTRACT Animal movement paths are represented by point-location time series called relocation data. How well such paths can be simulated, when the rules governing movement depend on the internal state of individuals and environmental factors (both local and, when memory is involved, global) remains an open question. To answer this, we formulate and test models able to capture the essential statistics of multiphase versions of such paths (viz., movement-phase-specific step-length and turning-angle means, variances, auto-correlation, and cross correlation values), as well as broad scale movement patterns. The latter may include patchy coverage of the landscape, as well as the existence of home-range boundaries and gravitational centers-of-movement (e.g., centered around nests). Here we present a Numerus Model Builder implementation of two kinds of models: a high-frequency, multi-mode, biased, correlated random walk designed to simulate real movement data at a scale that permits simulation and identification of path segments that range from minutes to days; and a model that uses statistics extracted from relocation data—either empirical or simulated—to construct movement modes and phases at subhourly to daily scales. We evaluate how well our derived statistical movement model captures patterns produced by our more detailed simulation model as a way to evaluate how well derived statistical movement models may capture patterns occurring in empirical data

A short history of Te Mātāhauariki Research Institute

Te Mātāhauariki Institute was established to continue the work of a research programme which had been established under a contract awarded under the Public Good Science Fund (PGSF), to the School of Law at the University of Waikato. This was the first law project to be so funded in New Zealand. The programme, titled "Laws and Institutions for a Bicultural New Zealand", was developed by Professors Paul Havemann and Margaret Bedggood, at the suggestion and under the guidance and encouragement of Professor Michael Selby, then Deputy Vice Chancellor in charge of Research. The design and writing of the programme itself was almost entirely the work of Professor Havemann. The funding granted initially was $450,000 for two years

Will Unionism Prosper in Cyber-Space? The Promise of the Internet for Employee Organization

This paper argues that the low cost of information, communication, and interaction on the Web offers trade unions opportunities to improve services and attract members and thus reinvent themselves for the 21st Century. Analyzing current use of the Internet by unions in the United Kingdom and United States, we develop five hypothesis about the impact of the Internet on unions. 1) the Customized Services hypothesis that unions will individualize services; 2) the Cyber-organizing hypothesis that the Web will ease organization and produce virtual minority unions at many non-union firms; 3) the Cyber-democracy hypothesis that the Web will enhance democracy in unions; 4) the Cyber-dispute hypothesis that the Web will become an important space for industrial disputes; and 5) the New Internationalism hypothesis that the Web will strengthen the international labor community. If unions fail to exploit the opportunities on the Web to gain members, we expect other organizations, Internet recruitment sites, specialized advice centers, and the like, to fill the e-union niche.

The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment

The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, drafted by a group of academic law library directors, was promulgated in February 2009. It calls for two things: (1) open access publication of law school–published journals; and (2) an end to print publication of law journals, coupled with a commitment to keeping the electronic versions available in “stable, open, digital formats.” The two years since the Statement was issued have seen increased publication of law journals in openly available electronic formats, but little movement toward all-electronic publication. This article discusses the issues raised by the Durham Statement, the current state of law journal publishing, and directions forward

Automated detection of effective scene illuminant chromaticity from specular highlights in digital images

An advanced, automated method is presented for determining an effective scene illuminant chromaticity (scene illuminant plus imaging system variables) from specular highlights in digital images subsequent to image capture. Underlying theories are presented based on a two component reflection model where the scene illuminant relative spectral power distribution is preserved in the specular component. Related methodologies for extracting scene illuminant information as well as alternative methods for achieving color constancy are presented along with factors which inhibit successful implementation. Following, development of a more robust algorithm is discussed. This algorithm is based on locating the center of convergence of a radial line pattern in the two-dimensional chromaticity histogram which theoretically identifies the effective scene illuminant chromaticity. This is achieved by using a radiality index to quantify the relative correlation between a radial mask and the histogram radial line pattern at discrete chromaticity coordinates within a specified search region. The coordinates associated with the strongest radiality index are adopted to represent the effective scene illuminant chromaticity. For a set of controlled test images, the physics-based specular highlight algorithm determined effective scene illuminant chromaticities to a level of accuracy which was nearly three times better than that of a benchmark statistically-based gray-world algorithm. The primary advantage of the specular highlight algorithm was its sustained performance when presented with image conditions of dominant colors, weak specular reflections, and strong interreflections